Wire products, such as springs or hangers, made by bending, twisting, winding a metal wire are traditionally mass-manufactured by means of a wire product manufacturing device. The conventional wire product manufacturing device comprises a plurality of guide rollers that guide a metal wire forwarded from a supply and a plurality of feeding roller pairs each comprising an upper roller and a lower roller facing each other to pinchingly receive the metal wire supplied through the guide rollers and thus drive the metal wire forward for feeding the wire into a shaping device. The shaping device comprises a base having a head on which a central bore is provided. A number of tool sets are provided on the base to surround the central bore and radially extending therefrom. The metal wire fed to the shaping device is moved through the central bore. Each of the tool sets has a tool thereon which is movable to engage the metal wire extending through the central bore for operating on the metal wire to make the desired wire product.
For different wire products, there may be different number of bending operations to be performed on the metal wire so that the quantity of the tool sets has to be adjusted in order to match the requirements of different wire products. The tool sets are positioned at angular locations corresponding to the desired bending angles of the bendings to be formed on the metal wire. Thus, in case a great number of bending operations have to be formed on a single length of metal wire in order to manufacture a wire product, there should be a great number of tool sets to operate on the metal wire. This increases the tool cost.
Further, the greater the number of the tool sets is, the more the time and labor needed to install and/or remove the tool sets. This also increases the cost in manufacturing the wire products.
Thus it is desirable to have a wire product manufacturing apparatus which overcomes the problems encountered in the prior art.